[LINK] ICT Predictions 2009 - little OT (gov't reports example)

[Anthony Hornby]

Thanks Tom,
I misunderstood what you wrote - it seems I need to read things more
carefully !!

What you proposed sounds great - now we just need the government  to
implement it ;-)

For now I'm going to keep looking at what PANDORA is doing - I hope
this might be a way to improve access for our clients in the shorter
term.

Regards Anthony


2009/1/27 Tom Worthington <Tom.Worthington at tomw.net.au>:
> At 11:18 AM 23/01/2009, anthony.w.hornby at gmail.com wrote:
>>
>> Thanks for the info Tom,
>>
>> > Providing the URL of the document on the web should meet the requirement
>> > to "supply" a copy.
>>
>> We'd still prefer a way to get that delivered to us automatically so we
>> don't have to go searching for it. We don't want government pushing the cost
>> of their disorganisation on to us. ...
>
> My proposal was that an index to publications would be automatically
> generated and made available online. This would obviously include an alert
> service to tell you what new publications there are available. You could
> then select those you did want and click on the link to get them. This would
> seem to me to be more convenient than having the government send you copies
> of stuff, most of which you probably don't want.
>
>> It that light it would still be prefereable to have one area do this
>> gathering of material into a structured repository that everyone else could
>> just harvest from automatically ... probably pay for someone to gather,
>> mark-up and ingest everything into a repository. ...
>
> Yes, I was proposing a small modification to the government's existing
> search engine, so it could identify and specially index "reports". This
> would be similar to the way it already collects media releases from
> Australian Government websites, providing a search service
>  <http://australia.gov.au/News_and_Media>, list by portfolio
> <http://media.australia.gov.au/notify/releases-by-portfolio.html> and RSS
> feed: <http://media.australia.gov.au/notify/rss.cgi>.
>
> If this was then used as the official list of reports, it would provide a
> powerful incentive for agencies to include the required metadata. If they
> did not do so their report would not be identified and would therefore not
> be considered to have been prepared. Parliamentary committees and others
> would then be asking the agencies why they had not complied with the
> requirements to submit their reports.
>
>> ... If not a central repository then at least a structured feed of some
>> sort we could harvest from that tied together all the web links with a
>> standard metadata schema ...
>
> Yes, I was suggesting using the Dublin Core metadata standard for government
> reports, as this is already the government standard for web pages.
>
>>  In the short term I'll be looking closely at what NLA is doing with
>> PANDORA as this might meet most of our need. ...
>
> Yes, Pandora would be a good option.
>
>
>
> Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
> Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
> PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
> Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Australian National University
>